Eleven killed in skydiving plane crash near Nancy

All 11 people aboard a light aircraft taking first-time parachutists up for a jump were killed when the plane crashed seconds after take-off from a small aerodrome on the edge of Nancy on Sunday, in one of the deadliest civil aviation accidents in France in years and a disaster that unfolded on the southern doorstep of the Greater Region.

The single-engine aircraft went down around 11am local time on 28 June at Tomblaine, a commune adjoining Nancy in the Meurthe-et-Moselle department of north-eastern France. According to Al Jazeera and Euronews, it came to rest on a grassy area close to the runway of the Nancy-Essey aerodrome, near a residential zone and two roads. No one on the ground was hurt.

The dead were the pilot and 10 passengers — five skydiving instructors and five students — according to Al Jazeera, which cited local authorities. French outlets reported that the group had come for an introductory parachute outing, a baptême de parachutisme, and that the trainees included freelance nurses from the department.

A flight that lasted seconds

The aircraft had only just left the ground. The mayor of Tomblaine, Hervé Féron, said the plane was in its climb when it dropped without warning, and Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez described it as having «tombé subitement» — fallen suddenly — after take-off, according to franceinfo. Specialist aviation outlet AeroTime reported that the aircraft drifted slightly to the left after take-off, entered a left turn and crashed just outside the airport perimeter near a commercial area.

A resident who lives nearby told Al Jazeera he had heard “a noise as if the engine stopped in mid-air,” followed by a loud bang. The cause of the crash has not been established, and officials cautioned that it could be days or weeks before the sequence of events is understood.

There was no collateral damage, but unfortunately all the people who were inside died.

That assessment, from Mayor Féron, was echoed by the prefecture of Meurthe-et-Moselle, which said there were no casualties on the ground.

The aircraft and the operator

The aircraft was a Pilatus PC-6 Turbo Porter, a Swiss-built single-engine high-wing turboprop that is a workhorse of parachute clubs around the world for its short-field performance and its ability to carry a stick of jumpers to altitude. AeroTime and the French specialist site Avions Légendaires identified it as a German-registered PC-6, registration D-FIPS, operated for a parachuting club based at the airfield. Avions Légendaires reported that the airframe dated from the early 1990s; that ownership history could not be independently confirmed and is not central to the loss.

Among the dead were the instructors who run such introductory jumps and the novices who had signed up for them — a profile that has made the accident resonate well beyond aviation circles. France’s Transport Minister, Philippe Tabarot, called it a terrible tragedy and said there had not been a skydiving accident of comparable severity in roughly three decades, according to French broadcasters.

How the investigation will proceed

France has opened parallel inquiries. The BEA — the Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses pour la sécurité de l’aviation civile, the country’s civil aviation safety investigator — has launched a technical investigation and sent a team to the site. A separate judicial inquiry has been entrusted to the Nancy prosecutor’s office, working with the gendarmerie’s air-transport investigators.

Investigators are expected to focus on a familiar checklist for a loss of control shortly after take-off:

• the aircraft’s flight path and whether it stalled during the climb;
• the engine and the airframe’s technical condition and maintenance record;
• the loading and weight-and-balance of the aircraft;
• the weather at the time; and
• witness accounts and any recorded flight data.

French officials described the crash as the deadliest civil aviation accident in France outside military and commercial transport, a measure of how unusual a loss of this scale is in recreational flying.

A tragedy on the Greater Region’s edge

For readers in Luxembourg, the geography is striking. Nancy lies roughly 100 km south of the Grand Duchy — about 102 km in a straight line from Luxembourg City and a little under 120 km by motorway — in a corner of Lorraine that sits within the cross-border Greater Region. It is country that tens of thousands of cross-border commuters and weekend travellers know well, even if there is no indication that any Luxembourg residents were among the victims.

That proximity is a reminder of how closely the Grand Duchy is woven into the life of its French neighbour. The Greater Region — spanning Luxembourg, Lorraine, the Saarland, Rhineland-Palatinate and Wallonia — functions as a single labour market and travel zone, and a disaster in Meurthe-et-Moselle lands as local news on both sides of the border.

As night fell on Sunday, the wreckage at Tomblaine was sealed off and the painstaking work of identifying the dead and reconstructing the flight had begun. For the families of the instructors and the first-time jumpers who set out for a clear-sky Sunday over Lorraine, the answers cannot come quickly enough.